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Niceforms v2.0 Gives Your Forms New Themes

We have featured Niceforms v1.0 long time ago. It is a script that will replace the most commonly used form elements with custom designed ones. And it looks very pretty as well. However, there were some limitations and minor bugs. I am always hoping for a new version.

Finally! After what seemed like an eternity, the fully revamped version of Niceforms is ready to make its debut. Pretty much everything is new, from the basic coding approach, to the number of elements it handles, to the customization options. Niceforms v2.0 fully supports all modern browsers, with the exception of IE6, in which case it degrades gracefully to the original form.

You can customize the look of your forms in any way you want by creating your own themes. Since Niceforms replaces the form elements with images, it’s just a matter of slicing these images up correctly and creating the CSS that holds them all together. More themes are on the way as well.

Andy, by that logic we should structure our sites with nothing more than the physical layout (floated columns, etc) and basic formatting (unstyled CSS).

What separates designers from developers is that they understand the value of a good user experience. Nobody understands this better than Apple’s designers, to use an obvious example. :)

A nice form can be appropriate and improve the feel of the site significantly — particularly if that form happens to be a prominent part of the design (eg: in the header). As long as the designer does his job well and the form remains intuitive and just as accessible as its unstyled counterpart, there’s no problem.

Ryan, I don’t think you speak for all developers anymore than you speak for designers. Both can appreciate the value of a good user experience. A pretty form doesn’t necessarily mean a better experience. I also don’t think that Andy meant leaving forms unstyled was the way to go. I think the argument is how does Niceforms improve the user experience over standard widgets. Please do tell.

Jerome

I’m using this library and I have into my forms files input, so I wanted to know if there is a version of this library that supports them, let me know if there is.
thx

What I’m saying is that using these workarounds will make your project hard to maintain. I agree that some times the forms are the ugly side of an application, but it is not all about the look.

When you create a UI you must consider: maintainability, performance as well as the visual side.

Carl Miranda

I absolutely agree Andy. I’m a project manager and I have to deal with both, designers and developers.

The key is balance – performance, design, usability and functionality . designers tend to devaluate anything but design, and developers tend to devaluate anything but performance. But for a website to be “marketable” has to have both.

I think the best example of balance is Google with it’s Google Analytics application.

Ryan Williams

That’s fair enough, Andy — should have said that before! :D I thought you were basically belittling any kind of form styling and calling it pointless, which was obviously a mistake on my part.

hcabbos, I appreciate that developers who understand design principles exist, just like designers who understand development principles exist.

Unfortunately I’ve personally encountered many people working with me on projects who completely refuse to make any effort to make the other department’s job any easier by throwing unstyled stuff all over the place, etc.

Gary

I have been using Niceforms for an enterprise scale application I am working on for the past 2 months.

The benefits it brings are huge and enhance the user experience ten fold.

Hoever, there are a LOT of problems with Niceforms v2.0. Many of these I have found work arounds to, but more often than not this involves having to add additional properties and methods into the jQuery code, and seems, to me, to be more hassle than it’s worth.

I am too far along in my current project to stop using NiceForms now, but it really has added a number of days onto the project lifetime, which really were unecessary,

This product is great on simple forms and simple layouts, but anything slightly more complex causes problems (e.g. checkboxes and radio buttons not firing the correct onchange events, settign the focus of forms elements doesn’t work on pageLoad rather you have to use a settimeout call back method to achieve).